Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance tried to assure NBC News Meet the Press host Kristen Welker that his intention behind the “sarcastic comment” he made about childless cat ladies was his take on women wanting more “options.”
In the summer of 2021, the then-US Senate candidate told Tucker Carlson that he believed the United States was effectively run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” In that interview, he mentioned now-Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who is a stepmother, by name.
When Welker asked him about these comments, Vance said that he’s talked to women, and what he “consistently hear[s] is that a lot of young women feel like they don’t have options.” He continued, “I just want women to have more choices.”
Vance was talking about how hard it is for mothers to have children, as well as a fruitful and healthy career. This reality is difficult for the around 24 million working mothers (with children under 18) across the country, who tend to make less than their fatherly counterparts and are more likely to do a heavier share of the work it takes to keep children alive and well at home.
On other hard decisions for mothers, Vance has suggested that women ought to stay in violent marriages for the sake of the children.
Sunday’s MTP interview is the latest in what could have been an apology tour for Vance’s past remarks, but has instead turned into a continual reframing of the original quote. On Sunday, Welker gave her guest several opportunities to apologize directly, but to little avail.
Some women, Welker began, feel like the comments were a “gut punch to them.” “Do you regret making that comment?” she asked.
“Look,” Vance responded, “I regret, certainly, that a lot of people took it the wrong way.”
“But do you regret what you said, senator?” Welker followed up.
“Listen, I’m going to say things from time to time that people disagree with. I’m a real person. I’m gonna make jokes, I’m going to say things sarcastically, and I think that what’s important is that we focus on the policy.”
“But again, just very quickly,” Welker pushed, “given that people have told you directly, have spoken out, have said that they were offended, they were hurt by those comments, do you wish you’d never made those ‘childless cat lady’ comments?”
“I think it’s important for me to just be a normal human being who sometimes says things that people disagree—”
“So no regrets?” Welker cut in.
“I have a lot of regrets, Kristen, but making a joke three years ago is not in the top ten list,” Vance said with a smile.
Women across the country have shown—in polling, at the ballot box, and on the streets—that they do want more options. Options like if they want to have children and who has a right to interfere in that process—choices that Vance has supported getting rid of over the years.
In 2023, when those in his own state of Ohio voted to enshrine the right to access abortion care into their constitution, Vance posted a damning statement on X, former Twitter, saying in part that, “There is something sociopathic about a political movement that tells young women (and men) that it is liberating to murder their own children. So let’s keep fighting for our country’s children, and let’s find a way to win.”
In Vance’s most recent Meet the Press interview, he claimed that his running mate, former president Donald Trump, would not sign a federal abortion ban—even though he voiced support for one when he was in office.
And, when the Texas legislature passed a near-total abortion ban in 2021, Vance said that “it’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term” but “whether a child should be allowed to live even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society.”
“We want women to have opportunities, we want women to have choices,” he continued in a podcast episode at the time, “but above all, we want women and young boys in the womb to have the right to life.”
